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The Way to Salvation: The Hollywood Blockbuster of the 1950s
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
Extract
The religious epic, which consistently dominated the annual list of top-grossing films throughout the 1950s, was spawned by the trying conditions that developed in the United States, and Hollywood in particular, during the aftermath of World War II. V-J Day sent the country on a short-lived spree from which it awoke with a hangover that was to last for years. If most anticipated the difficulties of finding jobs and housing, few foresaw the soaring inflation and crippling strikes that followed. To make matters worse, Soviet belligerence and the frightening spread of Communism soon intruded the prospect of another war and a possible nuclear holocaust. Mounting disagreement over appropriate solutions eroded belief that any would work. For many people, the best years of their lives, of which the war was once thought to have robbed them, began to appear as though they may well have been the best.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980
References
NOTES
1. Houseman, John, “Hollywood Faces the Fifties,” Harper's, 05 1950, p. 52Google Scholar, and Jowett, Garth, Film: The Democratic Art (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), pp. 347–48.Google Scholar
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9. Between 1947 and 1950 the percentage of social problem and psychological films being made dropped from 28 percent of the total to 11.7 percent. John Cogley, Table 15 in Report on Blacklisting I: Movies (Fund for the Republic, 1950), pp. 282, 284.
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24. The Robe actually premiered in October 1953, but its popularity continued well beyond the spring 1954 hearings.